Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy Page 3

  Chapter 3. Scholar

   

  Cambridge, England, Earth, January 2021

   

  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

  Henry David Thoreau— Walden

   

  “Sorry I’m late! Bike puncture. You know.”

  The young woman breezed into Jack Corstorphine’s freezing office, a collision of scarf, hands, long black hair and longer legs, all radiating from a huge, shapeless sweater which at the beginning of its evidently long life might once have been purple. She sat down in the only empty chair, the one farthest from the door, almost but not quite tripping over the three already more than occupied by the bovine rowers from St John’s.

  Jack, notes in hand, had been just about to open his mouth to introduce today’s supervision topic—evidence for culture in the African Middle Stone Age—in part to compensate for the gaping holes in the lectures given by his doctorate supervisor, Professor MacLennane. But when he looked up, the words froze in his mouth. Now that the student had found her seat, she was engaged in a flurry of business, pulling off the sack-like sweater (she had no coat despite the weather) and getting her notes out of an unwieldy market bag, the contents of which were spilling out all over the floor. Amid the usual detritus (why are the interiors of women’s bags so shockingly untidy?) Jack noticed the glint of an oversized, tortoiseshell-plastic comb. He noticed that the comb had all its teeth, which was amazing given the density and apparently unconquerable untidiness of hair it plainly had to deal with.

  The woman, notes now found, sat up, and as she did so, parted the curtain of hair from her face and smiled. It was the most frank, open smile he’d ever seen, made lovelier by her evident distraction as she fought the long defeat of trying to confine at least some of her hair in a barrette. Now he could see her face, he noticed a bone-white complexion dominated by two big, very round eyes, so brown as to be almost black. Jack was pulled up sharply by their penetrating, judgmental ferocity.

  “Jadis Markham?”

  “Er… sorry?”

  “You’re Jadis Markham, aren’t you?” Jack couldn’t help but smile at her in response to her apparent absent-mindedness. Not that he’d be fooled. Those eyes. Those eyes gave every impression that the disorganized exterior concealed a mind like the proverbial steel trap. She stopped smiling, just then, and her eyes dulled, as if momentarily consulting some deep, interior resource, as if to search for her own name. Having retrieved this information, she smiled again, a flash that filled the room. Just for an instant he felt that he’d been pulled clear from his body and was floating in empty space.

  “Yes. That’s me. So that makes you Jack Corstorphine, doesn’t it? I must have come to the right place. What a relief!”

  The cultural innovation of the African Middle Stone Age carried on, as if nothing had happened. Almost.

  Then in his second year of a doctorate program (‘Models of land use derived from geomorphology and lithic distributions in the British Palaeolithic’), Jack found that teaching undergraduates in small groups not only supplemented their meager instruction from their lecturers, and his own exiguous stipend, but filled, for him, a social void. Jack thought himself shy, but what the world saw in him was tact, reserve and laconic humor. That, and a reasonable capacity for administration, came to the notice of hard-pressed college tutors looking for a safe pair of hands for their charges.

  So, without really noticing, Jack spent much of his waking, working life teaching undergraduates. To his surprise he found that he enjoyed it very much, not least because it was the one part of his life in which he was forced to interact with other human beings, not just on the intellectual level, but on any level at all.

  Although attached to a college, as all Cambridge students were obliged to be, Jack found few attractions in college life. His fieldwork was by necessity solitary: his laboratory work, hardly less. His real love was the outdoors. He tramped alone, all over England, refining an already intuitive yet sharp sense of landscape, and how human beings (and other people) had shaped it over millennia. He poked into crabbed caves in the bleak limestone of Derbyshire, the foam-flecked Gower peninsula of south Wales, and bluebell-lined Torbay, trying to picture each scene through a Neanderthal’s eyes; he scoured the Vale of Pickering beneath the North York Moors, where some of Britain’s earliest stockmen had corralled their cattle. For weeks at a time he’d live rough, fishing by day, camping in potholes or under hedgerows at night, returning to his disapproving landlady in Victoria Road, stinking, bright-eyed and bearded, like an Old-Testament prophet. “I was trying to find out what it must have been like,” he would protest, weakly and futilely, as she prodded him (with her broom) towards the bathroom.

  This quiet young man who had found most of his need for company satisfied by wind on the fells was, in Cambridge, just beginning to emerge from his shell. He admitted that it was the undergraduates who were responsible for this injection of—what was it? Yes, life. In those relatively short periods of the year when the undergraduates were in season, as it were, life was one big whirl, as if the circus had come to town. When they left again, and he—as a graduate student—had to keep on working, all was grey and dull. The fact was that even the dimmest Cambridge undergraduates had a shameless self-assurance that could stand any assault, overcome any challenge. Compared with the general mass of humanity they seemed more focused, more colorful, more alive.

  “The African Middle Stone Age was…”

  Now, this was something that always amazed him. As soon as he drew himself up to speak, putting on his official ‘supervision’ voice, they were all attention. This never happened at his old university, where a patina of well-meaning dullness coated all endeavor. What’s more, it felt good, as a departmental dogs-body, to be treated as an authority.

  Even then, Jack saw that his latest student, Jadis Markham, was just that bit more studious, more attentive, than any of the others. Her initial lateness was her one anomaly. Her assignments were always returned on time, and were always substantially better argued than anyone else’s. She had a way of taking every aspect of a problem apart, no matter how woolly it seemed at first; polishing up the parts to reveal the assumptions on which each aspect was based; reducing these, in turn, to their elements; modeling how the aspects should look if put together correctly; and then, just, well… doing it, achieving original insights into questions which (Jack realized in hindsight) had been intractable simply because nobody had seen fit to question their underlying assumptions. On the face of it, what she was doing was simple, just science, in the raw. On the other hand, it was as refreshing as finding a door in a hitherto neglected garden wall which everyone had just walked past, without even noticing that it was there.

  “… the Middle Stone Age describes a series of cultures over an enormous period of time…”

  The three rowers from St John’s scribbled in their notebooks, heads down. Jadis Markham’s notebook lay untouched on her lap, as she gazed, apparently unblinking, at Jack, her face in an unnerving frown of concentration, as if she recognized him from somewhere, but couldn’t quite place him. Jack tried not to notice—it felt uncomfortable, like she was undressing him, taking off first his clothes, and then his skin, and then unpeeling the muscles from his bones.

  “… and some of these cultures were very sophisticated. Surprisingly so, given their antiquity, and that some of the… well, the toolmakers… probably weren’t human. At least, not in the way we’d understand it today.”

  And so it went on, week after week, those assignments returned with uncanny perfection, those eyes boring holes into his soul.

  His nights were soon spent wondering what Jadis Markham looked like without the shapeless bags of her clothes. By day, he reasoned that any favoritism he showed might be related to the simple fact that Jadis could only ever seem attractive compared with the three cauliflower-eared meatheads that made up the rest of her particular class. He worried that he might have been giving h
er better marks than the others because she was the sole female in her group, so he tried a scientific control experiment. He asked some of his departmental colleagues who knew none of his students personally to mark their work blind, names removed. Jadis’ papers always came out on top.

  “A student who actually shows promise? Be still my beating heart,” said his supervisor, Professor MacLennane. “This is first-class material, no doubt about that. It shows such clarity of thought, something only too rare nowadays. She could go far. Keep your eye on her.” Not that Jack had the slightest intention of averting his gaze, but at least, he reasoned, he could appreciate her better without a guilty conscience.

  It was only later that it occurred to him that he hadn’t told Professor MacLennane that the student who’d turned in this stellar work was female. And this was a blind test. So how did he know?

  As soon as his duties as her supervisor were over, Jack asked her for a date.